Why do you care about finding this Tane so much? Caesar asked me this morning. It’s a good question. I think about Ethan’s look of disappointment when I left the hospital to come here and spy on Cargill. Why am I doing this? A sense of obligation to my uncle, sure. Plus a sense of professional pride—I find people, so if someone I found goes missing, it’s on me to fix that. And Tane seems like a nice guy, if a little goofy and clueless, so part of me is concerned about him. For him to be in bed with a bunch of hard-core prison gang members like Sureños 13 seems bizarre, although my guess is he stumbled into it and, once he was in deep, he was too afraid to leave. So he gets snatched by the FBI, only to get snatched again by Peaches and his crew. All while he just wanted a cheeseburger. D’s plan to get into the hotel room by sabotaging the air conditioner was clever, an updated version of smoking someone out of a hidey-hole. Sitting on my bike on a June night wearing a leather jacket, I can appreciate air conditioning all too well. Still, something about the story bothered me when I first heard it, caught my attention like a snag in a muddy river—you can’t see it, but you feel it. I do a slow scan of the street and try to remember what it was about Peaches’s story that bothered me. The FBI guarding a witness instead of the U.S. Marshals is unusual, but not impossible. Maybe Agent Scott didn’t fill out the proper interdepartmental paperwork to transfer Tane over to the Marshals. Maybe the Marshals were delayed in taking custody of Tane. Maybe—

The thought that’s been bothering me cracks open like an egg and I curse at how my brain wanders around and figures things out in its own time. I call Caesar and stare up into the dark tree branches spread above me, listening to the phone ring in my helmet’s headset.

“Suzie,” Caesar says in my ears.

“I need a cell phone number for Peaches,” I say. “Can you help me?”

There’s a pause. “I’m eating dinner.”

“You can’t eat and use your laptop at the same time?”

“I’m eating dinner with Frankie,” Caesar clarifies. “In a home that is empty of contractors.”

“They finished for the day? Good. Hey, maybe Frankie can help, too. Does he know how to call—”

“I’m having a romantic dinner with my man and then I’m going to take him to bed,” Caesar says.

“Fuck.”

“Blunt, but accurate.”

Either I’m blushing or the temperature just soared ten degrees in the last ten seconds. “I’m sorry, Caesar, I didn’t mean to—I’m sorry to bother y’all, I … look, I’ll just call tomorrow.”